Isn’t ‘smart city’ a misnomer for Guwahati?

GUWAHATI: Many in Guwahati tend to use the term 'smart city' as a misnomer to mean Guwahati. And it is not for nothing that they contest the word 'smart city' when it is used to mean 'Guwahati'.

A reality check can help one say if Guwahati is a 'smart city' in the true sense of the term.

Take the case of markets in Guwahati. It is a common scene to see one or two vendors selling vegetables and other items on roadsides at places that pull crowds. With the passage of time, slowly and certainly, such places sprawl into markets, causing much inconvenience to road users, including traffic movement.

Such a market that causes much inconvenience to road users in Guwahati is the one at Gopal Nagar in the Noonmati area of the Oil India Corporation (IOC) campus in the city. This market doesn't have permission from the Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC). When asked, some of the vegetable vendors in the market said that officials from GMC evict them from time to time. However, they have no way out, as they have to eke out their living. Each of the vendors has many hungry mouths to feed. They argue that if the GMC, as the regulating authority of markets in this metropolitan city, provides them with a specified vending zone, they can make both ends meet through hard work.

The situation is even more precarious at Ganeshguri, a posh area in Guwahati, as it is near Dispur. The area has two designated markets, one near the GS Road and the other opposite the Dispur Police Station on the hillside. However, both of these markets have vendors selling vegetables and other items illegally on footbaths. They cause much inconvenience to pedestrians and even the movement of traffic as people coming for shopping park their bikes on the roadside.

The question arises as to why the GMC continues to stop short of doing enough to solve the problem of vendors once and for all.

In 2022, the GMC identified as many as 81 probable vending zones without any proper survey of street vendors in the city. However, the GMC stopped short of declaring the identified areas as vending zones, let alone issuing identity cards to the vendors.

A section of senior GMC officials wants to show the pretext that they could not take any decision on the declaration of vending zones due to the promulgation of the MCC (Model Codes of Conduct) of the Lok Sabha election. However, the MCC came into effect very recently, and the civic body had enough time to declare vending zones in Guwahati before the notification for the Lok Sabha poll. And now, the MCC is no longer in force in the state.

Such sprawling illegal markets continue to come up in Guwahati under the very nose of the civic body that carries out eviction drives from time to time without success to evict the vendors who have no other places to do their business.

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